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[fanfic] Akogare (Hiro/Ando, PG) (REVISED)
Title: Akogare
(The object of my admiration)
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
tiptoe39
Rating: PG
Summary: My first Hiro/Ando ficlet. I originally wrote this fic's dialogue all in Japanese, then translated what I needed to, so it still has a slightly "foreign" flavor. EDIT: I have translated most of the dialogue now to make it accessible.
Author's note: Akogareru is the Japanese verb for to admire/to idolize/to put up on a pedestal. Akogare is the person one feels that way about. (And yes, Japanese people do say "E?" a whole heckuva lot. :D)
Hiro returned from Texas to face a livid Ando. "Hiro! You bastard..."
"E?" Hiro wasn't expecting to hear such a rude word come out of Ando's mouth. "What's with 'you bastard'?"
He had come to visit Ando at his bachelor pad in Nakano, a few minutes by train from downtown Tokyo. The place was a dump, but it was Hiro's home away from home before all this had happened, and it was minutes from the geekiest shopping center in the entire prefecture. In other words, perfect. Even though it had been months since he'd been there-- at least to Hiro's weary sense of time-- it was still crammed full of his stuff. Flimsy packages with dramatically posing figurines grinning out through the plastic picture windows. Fan comics printed on thin paper. A robot toy in seven pieces, packed inside a plastic bubble, straight from the vending machine. All signs that once he'd belonged here. He wasn't sure that was true anymore.
Ando rubbed his forehead. He paced back and forth in the small room. He looked out the window, looked at the floor, looked at Hiro. And his face turned beet red. "Listen," he said. "Do you have any idea how much you worried me, leaving me alone and going here and there in time and space getting involved in this and that?"
"E?" Hiro stared at him blankly a minute, then began apologizing, laughing the whole time. "Sorry, sorry, Ando-kun. But look, here I am, safe and sound!" His laugh had a wobble in it.
Ando turned away. "I wonder," he mumbled.
"Ando?" Hiro wandered up behind him, put his hand on his friend's shoulder. "What's wrong?"
How he could ask what was wrong was beyond him. "You know," he said, frowning. "Last year, you never would have left me behind anywhere you went."
Hiro didn't know what to say to that. Ando took the hand on his shoulder and returned it to Hiro's side, sighing as he did. "What changed, Hiro?" he asked with a trace of sadness. "How did you become such a... dark person?"
Hiro stared at him blankly. "Dark?" he repeated. Then he scowled. "I've become a serious person. A grown-up person. I would think you'd be glad for that, Ando-kun."
"Why the hell would I be glad you've turned into the kind of guy who'd put me in this mess!?" Ando burst out, and Hiro actually stumbled back a few paces. He began to say Ando's name, but it was like the dam had burst, like the final straw. Ando was now raging, panting, his face red. "It's his fault, isn't it?" he demanded. "The guy who killed your father. Your Takezo Kensei."
Hiro wavered. "Kensei is... special," he said weakly.
"Yeah, I'll bet. I'll bet he's plenty special. So special that normal, ordinary Ando-kun can't compete."
"Compete?" Hiro echoed hollowly. "You can't even compare the two of you!"
"What is he to you?" Ando demanded.
"E? What's with that!?"
"A friend? An enemy?" The voice wavered. "Or something else altogether?"
Hiro sighed. It was hard to quantify, and the look Ando was giving him, the sad eyes and the tight-lipped mouth, wasn't helping him concentrate. "It's... complicated," he said finally. "Princess Yaeko was..."
"Don't give me 'Princess Yaeko.'" Ando threw up his hands in frustration. "I read those papers you left me. You almost never talked about her. You barely knew her, did you? The one you talked about constantly, the one you were always with, wasn't the princess."
Hiro's mind was racing. He wanted to say he had no idea what Ando was talking about. But the truth was that he did have an idea. The possibility that kept lurking around the edges of his mind was one he'd pushed so far back that he'd taught himself not to ever think it. And for years, years, it had never come up. Why, after all this time, did it sound suspiciously like Ando was going in that direction?
And then Ando came out and said it. "Hiro. Were... were you in love with him?"
"Ando... what the?" It was all he could say. His jaw was on the floor right next to his eyeballs, which had surely popped out only seconds before. Ando knew? How... how much did he know, anyway?
"Don't give me 'what the,' either. I know you, Hiro." Yes, that had become painfully clear. Hiro felt a little like a fish on a stick, the kind they used to eat on festival afternoons. Everything from his tail to his brains was fried up, crispy, and ready to be devoured. He'd thought he'd been immune to this, he thought he'd protected his secrets, but apparently he was a long way from becoming his father. "Are you still in love with him?" Ando demanded.
He wanted nothing more than to freeze time and flee. But it still took him a moment to get those gears in motion, and Ando was quick enough to punch him in the face if he thought Hiro was about to flee-- and not only was Hiro sure Ando would pull it off, this was his last unbroken pair of glasses. Feudal Japan was tough on eyewear. "I'm telling you, it's complicated," he said lamely.
Ando heaved a long sigh, and his eyes left Hiro's face. There was something there, some sort of sadness or heaviness, that made Hiro's heart hurt. And now that the subject was out of the dungeon of taboo, his arms were aching too, watching the man on the other side of the room, long, lanky, his mind so clever, his voice usually so full of light and humor. And here he was, still so appealing but subdued, almost shy, whispering something under his breath.
"Won't I do?"
He had to have heard that wrong. "... E?"
Ando looked at him. The eyes, so plaintive...
"Ando... did you just say..." He couldn't repeat the words, but they were echoing in his brain. Won't I do? Won't I do? Won't I do?
The long, lean legs began moving toward him. Hiro's eyes followed each footfall, measuring the pace. How long before Ando was standing in front of him? And with each step, the rhythm of the man's voice, intoning like a taiko drum into his heart, low and resonant.
"Why do I, who was with you from the moment you discovered your power until you went to kill Sylar... I, who threw away my job and went with you to America... why do I lose to him?" And there he was, face to face, eye to eye. The few inches of height that separated them seeming to melt away. "Look at me, Hiro!" He was looking. How could he not? "I'm the one who's always been watching you, who's always admired you. So just once, look at me!"
Zutto omae wo mitete akogareta ore wo, ichido dake chanto miro!
Akogare. There was that word. Hiro shook his head and backed away from Ando's gaze. "Akogare... yeah," he said, and this time it was his voice that was heavy with sadness.
He turned to face the window, looked out at the express rocketing westward toward the suburb of Mitaka. It rumbled mercilessly, rattling the tiled roofs around it. "That's right," he said, "Kensei was my akogare. You know that better than anyone, Ando."
Behind him, Ando swallowed hard. Hiro went on.
"But to admire someone like that is dangerous, my friend. If you idolize me, I'll eventually disappoint you. I might let you down in the worst way."
"Like that matters to me!" Ando shouted, his hand on Hiro's shoulder. "I love you!"
"That's just it!" Hiro whirled, and this time they were a breath apart, unflinching, unblinking. The intimacy and pain of companions speaking truth. "You're the only one I never want to disappoint, Ando-kun. That's why I left you behind."
"Don't you believe in me at all? Can't you trust me?" Ando's hands clasped his in supplication.
"It's myself I can't trust," Hiro confessed. The touch of Ando's hands was a hot and jarring sensation, like the buzz of alcohol down the spine. It loosened his tongue and sent his mind into freefall. "I can't trust myself not to tell you how I feel. Not to tell you that my feelings for you go so much further than friendship. I keep hearing in my head how you'd laugh, and say, 'Oh, Hiro, I always knew you were a total fruit...'"
Ando burst with a brace of laughter that began with spitting all over Hiro's face and ended in him doubling over, clutching his stomach. "Ah.. aha..." Hiro wiped off his face and stared, horrified. "Sorry, sorry," Ando apologized, gazing up at Hiro and then going into a fresh round of chuckles. "That's... that's such a Hiro thing to say."
"I suppose it is." Hiro grinned ruefully, blushing.
"Better geeks than fruits," said Ando with a wink.
"That's the way we roll," agreed Hiro.
They smiled at each other for a moment.
"Hiro." Ando's voice broke a little bit. "So we're both fruits. What does it matter. You and I... we feel the same way."
His eyes were mesmerizing. Hiro heard himself agree, heard the room buzzing around him as the world contracted into a pair of dark eyes and gentle fingertips again on his own. The floor ceased to exist under his feet... "Wait a minute," he said, breaking out of the moment. "I thought you loved women... you were practically a molester!"
"Oh, that's cruel." Ando lifted his chin in defiance.
"I'm serious, Ando-kun!" Hiro put his hands on his hips and pouted. "You even hit on my sister!"
"Acting," Ando mumbled.
"E?"
"It was acting," he repeated, sounding a little proud of himself for pulling off the ruse. "First it was lying to myself, of course. But then it was just acting."
"My sister will be grossed out," Hiro warned.
Ando gave a guilty smile. "She knew. Probably."
"E?" Then again, Kimiko was always the smart one. She probably did.
"But Hiro." Hands pulling his off his hips. Hiro's heart went into overdrive. He felt like a hummingbird. He might very well be hovering in the room rather than standing. "This is... ryouomoi."
The bluntness of the sentiment -- ryou, mutual, and omoi, feelings, put together into a single word -- made Hiro so nervous, so giddy, he was afraid the curtain was going to be swept aside any moment. He was surely being taped for a hysterically laughing television audience. "Uh, yeah," he stammered. "Ryouomoi. Right." He laughed as though it were a particularly funny joke.
"Can I ..." Ando's thumb had started rubbing against the back of Hiro's hand, and the simple intimacy of the gesture knocked the laugh right out of him. He blushed beet red, and his glasses felt itchy on his cheeks. Ando gulped before finishing the request. "...k-kiss you?"
"K... kiss?" He hadn't meant to echo the stutter. It just came out.
Dead serious eyes. "Yeah."
Hiro's blood was rushing madly between his face and other, less mentionable parts. He felt warm and cold in the funniest places. "Hey," he blurted out. "If my sister knew, that means I'm the only person who didn't--"
Ando put a finger to Hiro's lips. "Hiro."
"Yes!?"
"Shut up."
The hand at his lips flipped upward to pull Hiro's glasses off, and Ando's other hand found his waist. Hiro's face followed the wayward glasses, as though attempting to pull them back, but in that small, vain upward motion, Ando leaned in and kissed him. Hiro's mind went white.
Had he stopped time? Had time stopped him? He didn't know, didn't know anything, just knew that his best friend was kissing his mouth and there was a wealth of warmth and emotion there that he'd never even contemplated could exist in this world.
When the kiss ended, and he blinked his eyes, he was still in the same apartment, with all the old familiar toys lying around, but now it no longer felt alien. And Ando was looking at him with the creases at the outer edges of his eyes that Hiro knew meant genuine affection. For a moment, he was sure he was dreaming. "No way," he breathed.
"Yes, way," Ando grinned.
Hiro went into hyperdrive. "Ando-kun. I'm moving, right? You can see me moving right?" He jumped around wildly to demonstrate.
"What the hell are you doing?" Ando cocked his head and raised one pointed eyebrow.
"Because... because that means time is still going, right? I didn't just stop time and kiss you while you were frozen, right?"
Ando crossed his arms. "Have you done that before?"
Hiro froze.
"Have you done that before?" he repeated.
"I told you that idolizing someone meant you'd eventually be disappointed!"
"You bastard..."
:end:
(The object of my admiration)
Author:
tiptoe39Rating: PG
Summary: My first Hiro/Ando ficlet. I originally wrote this fic's dialogue all in Japanese, then translated what I needed to, so it still has a slightly "foreign" flavor. EDIT: I have translated most of the dialogue now to make it accessible.
Author's note: Akogareru is the Japanese verb for to admire/to idolize/to put up on a pedestal. Akogare is the person one feels that way about. (And yes, Japanese people do say "E?" a whole heckuva lot. :D)
Hiro returned from Texas to face a livid Ando. "Hiro! You bastard..."
"E?" Hiro wasn't expecting to hear such a rude word come out of Ando's mouth. "What's with 'you bastard'?"
He had come to visit Ando at his bachelor pad in Nakano, a few minutes by train from downtown Tokyo. The place was a dump, but it was Hiro's home away from home before all this had happened, and it was minutes from the geekiest shopping center in the entire prefecture. In other words, perfect. Even though it had been months since he'd been there-- at least to Hiro's weary sense of time-- it was still crammed full of his stuff. Flimsy packages with dramatically posing figurines grinning out through the plastic picture windows. Fan comics printed on thin paper. A robot toy in seven pieces, packed inside a plastic bubble, straight from the vending machine. All signs that once he'd belonged here. He wasn't sure that was true anymore.
Ando rubbed his forehead. He paced back and forth in the small room. He looked out the window, looked at the floor, looked at Hiro. And his face turned beet red. "Listen," he said. "Do you have any idea how much you worried me, leaving me alone and going here and there in time and space getting involved in this and that?"
"E?" Hiro stared at him blankly a minute, then began apologizing, laughing the whole time. "Sorry, sorry, Ando-kun. But look, here I am, safe and sound!" His laugh had a wobble in it.
Ando turned away. "I wonder," he mumbled.
"Ando?" Hiro wandered up behind him, put his hand on his friend's shoulder. "What's wrong?"
How he could ask what was wrong was beyond him. "You know," he said, frowning. "Last year, you never would have left me behind anywhere you went."
Hiro didn't know what to say to that. Ando took the hand on his shoulder and returned it to Hiro's side, sighing as he did. "What changed, Hiro?" he asked with a trace of sadness. "How did you become such a... dark person?"
Hiro stared at him blankly. "Dark?" he repeated. Then he scowled. "I've become a serious person. A grown-up person. I would think you'd be glad for that, Ando-kun."
"Why the hell would I be glad you've turned into the kind of guy who'd put me in this mess!?" Ando burst out, and Hiro actually stumbled back a few paces. He began to say Ando's name, but it was like the dam had burst, like the final straw. Ando was now raging, panting, his face red. "It's his fault, isn't it?" he demanded. "The guy who killed your father. Your Takezo Kensei."
Hiro wavered. "Kensei is... special," he said weakly.
"Yeah, I'll bet. I'll bet he's plenty special. So special that normal, ordinary Ando-kun can't compete."
"Compete?" Hiro echoed hollowly. "You can't even compare the two of you!"
"What is he to you?" Ando demanded.
"E? What's with that!?"
"A friend? An enemy?" The voice wavered. "Or something else altogether?"
Hiro sighed. It was hard to quantify, and the look Ando was giving him, the sad eyes and the tight-lipped mouth, wasn't helping him concentrate. "It's... complicated," he said finally. "Princess Yaeko was..."
"Don't give me 'Princess Yaeko.'" Ando threw up his hands in frustration. "I read those papers you left me. You almost never talked about her. You barely knew her, did you? The one you talked about constantly, the one you were always with, wasn't the princess."
Hiro's mind was racing. He wanted to say he had no idea what Ando was talking about. But the truth was that he did have an idea. The possibility that kept lurking around the edges of his mind was one he'd pushed so far back that he'd taught himself not to ever think it. And for years, years, it had never come up. Why, after all this time, did it sound suspiciously like Ando was going in that direction?
And then Ando came out and said it. "Hiro. Were... were you in love with him?"
"Ando... what the?" It was all he could say. His jaw was on the floor right next to his eyeballs, which had surely popped out only seconds before. Ando knew? How... how much did he know, anyway?
"Don't give me 'what the,' either. I know you, Hiro." Yes, that had become painfully clear. Hiro felt a little like a fish on a stick, the kind they used to eat on festival afternoons. Everything from his tail to his brains was fried up, crispy, and ready to be devoured. He'd thought he'd been immune to this, he thought he'd protected his secrets, but apparently he was a long way from becoming his father. "Are you still in love with him?" Ando demanded.
He wanted nothing more than to freeze time and flee. But it still took him a moment to get those gears in motion, and Ando was quick enough to punch him in the face if he thought Hiro was about to flee-- and not only was Hiro sure Ando would pull it off, this was his last unbroken pair of glasses. Feudal Japan was tough on eyewear. "I'm telling you, it's complicated," he said lamely.
Ando heaved a long sigh, and his eyes left Hiro's face. There was something there, some sort of sadness or heaviness, that made Hiro's heart hurt. And now that the subject was out of the dungeon of taboo, his arms were aching too, watching the man on the other side of the room, long, lanky, his mind so clever, his voice usually so full of light and humor. And here he was, still so appealing but subdued, almost shy, whispering something under his breath.
"Won't I do?"
He had to have heard that wrong. "... E?"
Ando looked at him. The eyes, so plaintive...
"Ando... did you just say..." He couldn't repeat the words, but they were echoing in his brain. Won't I do? Won't I do? Won't I do?
The long, lean legs began moving toward him. Hiro's eyes followed each footfall, measuring the pace. How long before Ando was standing in front of him? And with each step, the rhythm of the man's voice, intoning like a taiko drum into his heart, low and resonant.
"Why do I, who was with you from the moment you discovered your power until you went to kill Sylar... I, who threw away my job and went with you to America... why do I lose to him?" And there he was, face to face, eye to eye. The few inches of height that separated them seeming to melt away. "Look at me, Hiro!" He was looking. How could he not? "I'm the one who's always been watching you, who's always admired you. So just once, look at me!"
Zutto omae wo mitete akogareta ore wo, ichido dake chanto miro!
Akogare. There was that word. Hiro shook his head and backed away from Ando's gaze. "Akogare... yeah," he said, and this time it was his voice that was heavy with sadness.
He turned to face the window, looked out at the express rocketing westward toward the suburb of Mitaka. It rumbled mercilessly, rattling the tiled roofs around it. "That's right," he said, "Kensei was my akogare. You know that better than anyone, Ando."
Behind him, Ando swallowed hard. Hiro went on.
"But to admire someone like that is dangerous, my friend. If you idolize me, I'll eventually disappoint you. I might let you down in the worst way."
"Like that matters to me!" Ando shouted, his hand on Hiro's shoulder. "I love you!"
"That's just it!" Hiro whirled, and this time they were a breath apart, unflinching, unblinking. The intimacy and pain of companions speaking truth. "You're the only one I never want to disappoint, Ando-kun. That's why I left you behind."
"Don't you believe in me at all? Can't you trust me?" Ando's hands clasped his in supplication.
"It's myself I can't trust," Hiro confessed. The touch of Ando's hands was a hot and jarring sensation, like the buzz of alcohol down the spine. It loosened his tongue and sent his mind into freefall. "I can't trust myself not to tell you how I feel. Not to tell you that my feelings for you go so much further than friendship. I keep hearing in my head how you'd laugh, and say, 'Oh, Hiro, I always knew you were a total fruit...'"
Ando burst with a brace of laughter that began with spitting all over Hiro's face and ended in him doubling over, clutching his stomach. "Ah.. aha..." Hiro wiped off his face and stared, horrified. "Sorry, sorry," Ando apologized, gazing up at Hiro and then going into a fresh round of chuckles. "That's... that's such a Hiro thing to say."
"I suppose it is." Hiro grinned ruefully, blushing.
"Better geeks than fruits," said Ando with a wink.
"That's the way we roll," agreed Hiro.
They smiled at each other for a moment.
"Hiro." Ando's voice broke a little bit. "So we're both fruits. What does it matter. You and I... we feel the same way."
His eyes were mesmerizing. Hiro heard himself agree, heard the room buzzing around him as the world contracted into a pair of dark eyes and gentle fingertips again on his own. The floor ceased to exist under his feet... "Wait a minute," he said, breaking out of the moment. "I thought you loved women... you were practically a molester!"
"Oh, that's cruel." Ando lifted his chin in defiance.
"I'm serious, Ando-kun!" Hiro put his hands on his hips and pouted. "You even hit on my sister!"
"Acting," Ando mumbled.
"E?"
"It was acting," he repeated, sounding a little proud of himself for pulling off the ruse. "First it was lying to myself, of course. But then it was just acting."
"My sister will be grossed out," Hiro warned.
Ando gave a guilty smile. "She knew. Probably."
"E?" Then again, Kimiko was always the smart one. She probably did.
"But Hiro." Hands pulling his off his hips. Hiro's heart went into overdrive. He felt like a hummingbird. He might very well be hovering in the room rather than standing. "This is... ryouomoi."
The bluntness of the sentiment -- ryou, mutual, and omoi, feelings, put together into a single word -- made Hiro so nervous, so giddy, he was afraid the curtain was going to be swept aside any moment. He was surely being taped for a hysterically laughing television audience. "Uh, yeah," he stammered. "Ryouomoi. Right." He laughed as though it were a particularly funny joke.
"Can I ..." Ando's thumb had started rubbing against the back of Hiro's hand, and the simple intimacy of the gesture knocked the laugh right out of him. He blushed beet red, and his glasses felt itchy on his cheeks. Ando gulped before finishing the request. "...k-kiss you?"
"K... kiss?" He hadn't meant to echo the stutter. It just came out.
Dead serious eyes. "Yeah."
Hiro's blood was rushing madly between his face and other, less mentionable parts. He felt warm and cold in the funniest places. "Hey," he blurted out. "If my sister knew, that means I'm the only person who didn't--"
Ando put a finger to Hiro's lips. "Hiro."
"Yes!?"
"Shut up."
The hand at his lips flipped upward to pull Hiro's glasses off, and Ando's other hand found his waist. Hiro's face followed the wayward glasses, as though attempting to pull them back, but in that small, vain upward motion, Ando leaned in and kissed him. Hiro's mind went white.
Had he stopped time? Had time stopped him? He didn't know, didn't know anything, just knew that his best friend was kissing his mouth and there was a wealth of warmth and emotion there that he'd never even contemplated could exist in this world.
When the kiss ended, and he blinked his eyes, he was still in the same apartment, with all the old familiar toys lying around, but now it no longer felt alien. And Ando was looking at him with the creases at the outer edges of his eyes that Hiro knew meant genuine affection. For a moment, he was sure he was dreaming. "No way," he breathed.
"Yes, way," Ando grinned.
Hiro went into hyperdrive. "Ando-kun. I'm moving, right? You can see me moving right?" He jumped around wildly to demonstrate.
"What the hell are you doing?" Ando cocked his head and raised one pointed eyebrow.
"Because... because that means time is still going, right? I didn't just stop time and kiss you while you were frozen, right?"
Ando crossed his arms. "Have you done that before?"
Hiro froze.
"Have you done that before?" he repeated.
"I told you that idolizing someone meant you'd eventually be disappointed!"
"You bastard..."
:end: